Loomio
Fri 18 Jan 2019 3:36PM

Monthly Email List

TN Tom Narock Public Seen by 214

We've created an EarthArXiv mailing list at groups.io. This is an opt-in service where those interested can sign up for monthly summary emails highlighting what has been submitted to EarthArXiv. Please let your respective communities know that they can sign up via a simple web-based form at https://eartharxiv.github.io/

BC

Bruce Caron Fri 18 Jan 2019 3:49PM

I can send an email to the master email list (at ESIP) telling them they can sign up for the monthly summary emails.

TN

Tom Narock Fri 18 Jan 2019 4:29PM

Thanks Bruce. I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of people that have signed up already. 30 in the first 2 hours. I think we've found a feature that people want.

SG

Stéphanie Girardclos Fri 18 Jan 2019 7:10PM

Thanks Tom. This is great!

DI

Daniel Ibarra Sat 19 Jan 2019 1:28AM

seconded! Great idea

CJ

Christopher Jackson Tue 22 Jan 2019 8:31PM

Awesome. Signed-up.


Professor Christopher Aiden-Lee Jackson

Equinor Professor of Basin Analysis

Basins Research Group (BRG ( http://www.basinsresearchgroup.com/ ))

Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Imperial College

Prince Consort Road

LONDON

SW7 2BP

UK

Email: [email protected] ( [email protected] )

Web: www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.jackson ( http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.jackson )

Twitter: @seis_matters


Co-founder of EarthArXiv ( https://eartharxiv.org/ ), a preprint server and postprint archive for the Earth Sciences


My working day may not be your working day. Please do not feel obliged to reply to this email outside of your normal working hours.

JF

Jamie Farquharson Fri 1 Mar 2019 4:17PM

I had an informal focus group in my department regarding EarthArXiv, and one of the topics that came up was the summary emails. Multiple people I talked to expressed frustration at not being able to customise the alerts they receive (i.e. refining by a certain topic or selection of topics à la Google Scholar), and two people had in fact unsubscribed from the list for this reason. Would this be reasonable functionality to include? It would be interesting to know the general feeling about this: personally I don't mind scrolling through a long email, or just using the search function to do a quick search of the body text, but it appears that it's not for everyone.

TN

Tom Narock Fri 1 Mar 2019 4:47PM

I understand their frustration and think it would be a useful function to have. However, it would be very labor intensive to add such functionality. Currently, the infrastructure isn't in place to support such functionality. It's a semi-manual process at the moment. I wrote a small program that queries EarthArXiv for all the papers published in the past month. I then copy and paste the output into a group email. There's no means to record preferences and specialize the messages accordingly. Technically speaking, it's doable. I can envision a web-based registration form and a database that holds each user's preferred topics. There could be other software on top of the database that parses the master list of preprints and generates custom messages. But, it would be time consuming and labor intensive to build such a system. It's outside of what we can currently do with volunteer effort. Maybe someone would fund this as a research project if it turns out there is large scale interest in such functionality.

JF

Jamie Farquharson Fri 1 Mar 2019 4:49PM

Aye, this is pretty much what I was thinking. I'll pass this info along, thanks.

BC

Bruce Caron Sat 2 Mar 2019 3:28PM

Remember tom... no good deed will go unpunished! :slight_smile:

VV

Victor Venema Sat 2 Mar 2019 4:27PM

Great to have such an email service. Helps to remember to look for new preprints, especially as long as we only have a few per week and people will not go the site that often.

On the request by @jamiefarquharson to be able to select a subsection: My topic is homogenization of climate data. "Homogenization" is used in many fields. "Climate data" is also a bad term, people may just write temperature or precipitation. So searching for new articles is always hard for me.

Thus I was wondering if there are any open services where you put in a list of articles you wrote or are interested in, which then gives regular reminders of new articles. Looking not only at keywords, but also authors and references it should be possible to make a cluster analysis and make a pretty good guess who would be interested in which new article. At least much better than a keyword search and also better than getting all articles of people in your network at your preferred proprietary Science Facebook. Even for people with better searchable topics than mine, this would be a helpful discovery service and would make it less important where you publish, thus helping independent and new OA publishing.

Does anyone know of such a service or would anyone be interested in creating it (together)? Preferably not just for OSF preprints, but at least for all preprints and personally I would prefer to also include OA and pay-walled articles.